


Five More Minutes

by ShadowPorpoise



Series: Undertree [2]
Category: Dreamtale - Fandom, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Broken Families, Brotherly Angst, Brotherly Love, Brothers, Bullying, Captivity, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Dreamtale, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Drama, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, No Plot/Plotless, No Romance, No Smut, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Present Tense, Psychological Trauma, Sequel, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Swearing, Trauma, Trust, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 17,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23546314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowPorpoise/pseuds/ShadowPorpoise
Summary: This isn't a dream, but... how long have you been asleep?Dream and Nightmare have a lot of ground to cover in their tentatively restored relationship.Sequel toOne Hour,so please go back and read that if you haven't already.
Relationships: Dream & Nightmare, Dream!Sans & Nightmare!Sans, Sans & Sans (Undertale)
Series: Undertree [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694557
Comments: 89
Kudos: 142





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, I am new to this AU and have some ideas about it that probably aren't quite consistent with the established canon.
> 
> Mind the tags if you're concerned something in this work might be difficult for you to read. I'll try to put warnings on the chapters themselves if anything new comes up.
> 
> DreamTale, Dream!Sans, Nightmare!Sans, and Neil created by Joku  
> Ink!Sans created by Comyet  
> Error!Sans created by CrayonQueen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mood music if you want: https://youtu.be/VbO1KIwyFS8

It’s not sleeping. This… _thing_ that Dream does. His eyes are closed and his breathing stills to a crawl. His mind is rapidly wandering up and down along the tenuous strands of emotion radiating from his core. All thought has ceased and only feeling remains, but not the sharp, conscious kind of feeling where you decide what to feel as much as feel it; no, this is as close as a keeper can get to taking a nap. Allowing whatever is felt to be felt, regardless of effort, purpose, or morals. They are not even strictly _his_ feelings. Just whatever might happen to come into his soul from the outside, from the inside, or anywhere in between.

Nightmare hasn’t done that in eons. Since that first moment he was completely overtaken by the insatiable cruelty of an entire universe. Since he lost himself in the emotion of others and allowed it to become his own. Nightmare has kept vigilant since then. Refusing to acknowledge any feeling but his own _as_ his own, even if it means acting, _pretending_ like it is so as to avoid becoming lost in another crisis of identity when what he feels and what he senses contradict.

He envies Dream his quietude. The amount of serene confidence he must have achieved in order to be able to sit so still and silent beside him, against that tree. It is one of their favorite spots, this place, though they can only stay for ten minutes at a time.

Even now, as he watches, Dream tips a little against his shoulder. Nightmare stiffens but doesn’t react. It is very difficult to “wake” a keeper in this state, and even more difficult to restore the calm when they are brought back too suddenly. Dream will return when these ten minutes are up, Nightmare is sure of it. Whatever else Dream might be, he is not irresponsible. Not after the last time they came back late, to the multiverse. So instead, Nightmare closes his book and shifts slightly to get more comfortable. Following Dream into the dark.

They traverse their separate paths. Drifting through the vague, weakened emotions permeating the air around their meeting place. Letting go their many cares and duties to simply _be_ , and be peacefully. Dream is the one who must awaken Nightmare when their time is up, and, as predicted, it is not easy. His eyes are wide and fearful, staring into Nightmare’s when he finally comes to, blinking groggily.

“We’re going to be late again,” Dream says quietly. “I thought you were going to stay conscious.”

Nightmare thought so too. He struggles to his feet, not even realizing he’s taken the helping hand of the other in order to do so. Despite his concern, Dream seems pleased at his progress. “You haven’t drifted off in…”

“Never.”

Dream is smiling wider. “It’s getting better, isn’t it?”

“What?” He’s irritable from being disturbed so soon after he started to relax. His temper is building again, and he pulls away, stepping back toward where he guesses the portal must be.

“…Everything.”

“Depends how you define better. And everything.” But Nightmare’s grimace is not unkind as he looks back at his brother, trying not to spoil Dream’s good mood. He’s going to need it if they do end up being late, after all. “But,” he continues, curious against his better judgement, “You seem to drift easily enough for both of us. Almost thought you were actually asleep for a minute.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to practice.”

“Oh?”

Dream is decidedly not looking at him as he falls into step beside him on their way back down the hill. And then it all clicks into place and Nightmare really, _really_ wishes he hadn’t asked.

“Sorry,” he mutters stupidly, and Dream laughs.

“Maybe I’ll give you the same opportunity, brother. To get better at it.”

“Not on your life.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same mood music. :)

“The soul is the culmination of a being. Through it, each living thing is able to process emotion. Without a soul, one cannot feel anything, and is liable to do a great many nonsensical things. Though some might argue for reason over sentiment, mind over spirit, the truth is that they are irrevocably entwined, and no logic can exist where there is not a heart to guide it. You might say, Emotion is the _soul_ of reason,” and the low, musical voice paused to laugh at some secret amusement.

“But mother, where is my soul?” Dream asked, entwining his little fingers within a couple of stray threads coming loose from the bottom of the flag, the great golden flag that bore the mark of the sun and would protect them, always, from the dark.

“You, little one, are an exception to this rule,” the voice told him, and Dream glowed at the revelation. He was different, he was special. Just like Nightmare said he was. “You do not have a soul. As guardian of all that is pure, all that is lovely, all that is noble and right - you are made up of the very essence of what is felt of goodness. Your very being _is_ a soul, Dream.”

“What about Night? Is he a soul, too?”

“He is a soul, too.”

“Is he an exceptional, too?”

Another low chuckle. “Yes.”

Dream thought about this for a long while. After mother went all but silent, and Dream couldn’t get a reply from her even if he hugged the tree as tight as he could, or rapped on it for hours until his knuckles were sore and raw and Nightmare told him to stop or he was going to hurt himself, and when Nightmare told you to stop something, in _that_ tone of voice, you stopped. And the storms came and Dream couldn’t hear his mother’s voice in the dark, telling him to be calm, to listen to what the night might have to say to him because he had a weakness, a great weakness she must tell him of before she went away, before she could not speak to him anymore. But she never did tell him what it was, and before long she could not, just as she warned him, and Dream was left alone with Nightmare, who didn’t let him think on it for one minute, but wrapped him all up in that golden shroud and told him not to be afraid, not to look at the darkness, and it could not hurt him. Nightmare looked, though. Nightmare could look at things like that and not even be bothered, because he _was_ the night, and so Dream didn’t have to be.

“Will she ever come back?”

“She’s still here, Dream.”

“But I cannot hear anything.”

“Listen with your inner ear, the way mom told us.”

“But I can’t feel anything from her, Night. I can’t feel anything. Can you?”

“…”

“She’s gone, isn’t she? She’s gone and she’s not coming back, is she?”

“It doesn’t matter, Dream. I’m here. And I won’t leave.”

“But, Night?”

“What?”

“I can’t feel anything from you now, either.”

But he could feel Nightmare’s arms around him, even in the darkness when he couldn’t _see_ anything. And it was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote a little poem about Dream and Nightmare today that I thought I'd share here in the notes. It doesn't have anything particular to do with this series, but I hope you enjoy it:
> 
> _If you knew I loved you still  
>  Would you meet me on that hill?  
> There where all we ever knew  
> Fades beneath a blackened view.  
> Dust has settled on the ground,  
> Not a fruit can there be found.  
> Once the golden and the dark  
> Joined with roots and leaves and bark,  
> Making such a pretty tree  
> Growing just for you and me.  
> Now we wander on our own -  
> Locked away as cold as stone.  
> Look at me, oh holy one -  
> You can’t see without the sun.  
> I am living in the night,  
> Knowing things can’t be put right.  
> Not, each passing day confirms,  
> If we don’t meet on equal terms_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **New Warnings: Suicide, Suicidal Ideation/Thoughts, Depression, Kidnapping, Captivity, Psychological/Emotional Abuse**
> 
> Mood music: https://youtu.be/iY4HnkvlQM4

They don’t always agree. Without the crisis of a multiverse-wide desensitization, the urgency of preventing all the myriad disasters that could take place because of it, laying aside their differences has proven to be a lot harder than Dream thought it would be.

“You always do this.”

“I don’t _do_ any of it. I just let them have what they want.”

“They don’t _have_ to want it though.”

“Fix it then.” Nightmare crosses his arms in a challenge. “Make her change her mind. I’ll wait.”

Dream looks helplessly on the little yellow monster where she dangles those little clawed feet over the edge of the ravine. Her hands still clutch at the multicolored stones peppering the bottom of the pool she has unceremoniously plopped herself in. Rapid currents tug fruitlessly at the sleeves of her lab coat, carrying empty cans, bottles, cartons, down, down, down into the darkness. Soon they will carry her off too, as devoid of life as all the rest. Her usual, admittedly shallow pulse of hope is all but silenced, and even when he concentrates, Dream can’t pick up the faintest trace of it. He shudders to think what Nightmare might be feeling at this moment, what he must be harvesting from her desolate soul even now. But Nightmare is waiting, as he said he would, for Dream to make up a difference, to save her like he never has before. Before, when they were at each other’s throats over many lives such as these.

“I… can’t. But that doesn’t mean - ”

“Doesn’t mean what, Dream? That I should let her be honest with herself about what she feels? Let her do what she inevitably does in timelines like these? I should change things, is that it? Silence the genuine cries of her heart, destroy my own essence and hers for the sake of your conscience?” With a careless flick of his tentacles, Nightmare has sent another invisible wave of despair back into the soul where it originated, and Alphys shuffles imperceptibly forward, releasing her grasp on the world that lies behind, and plummeting down into the void.

Dream turns his back on the sight, away from the edge. Shoulders rigid.

“Maybe if you came down here once in a while, you could actually make a change.”

It surprises him, the veiled accusation. Dream isn’t sure what to make of it, but he’s listening, glancing sullenly out at the other from the shadow of his hood. “What do you mean?”

“The Underground. You hate it, right? Reminds you of before. And you don’t want to think about that.”

He doesn’t. And so Nightmare’s words make little sense to him as he prepares to leave this place and its foul stench of litter and disorder and death behind. “I don’t know what you’re so sore about. You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” His voice comes out more choked, more condemning than he intends.

Nightmare barks a harsh, mirthless laugh. “You’re a liar, Dream. And you haven’t changed a bit. Still want to pretend everything is all perfect and happy without paying any of the consequences.”

“That’s not - ” Dream isn’t sure what has gotten into Nightmare this time but he’s beginning to feel uneasy. The other’s inky tentacles are starting and twitching dangerously, though he hasn’t moved from his spot, ankle deep in the foul water. That empty grin is fixed on his face and his eyes gleam from within deep pockets of sludge. All traces of positive feeling went out of him some hours ago, though Dream didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Nightmare can’t really help that, most days. And so, despite his own grief and frustration, Dream decides to deescalate the situation as swiftly as he can, taking a step back toward the other and holding out a tentative hand. “Night, we… we can talk about it at the tree, okay? Where there aren’t as many distractions.”

Dream doesn’t need to be able to sense negative emotion in order to catch the rage that flares into life behind Nightmare’s eyes. The octopine monster starts toward him and Dream resists the urge to flinch away. They are on the same side, now, he reminds himself. No matter what disagreements might come up between them from time to time, they can work them out. If they only remember the importance of their own feelings as well as everyone else’s. That’s what Nightmare decided, right?

But Dream knows he has miscalculated before the other even reaches him, before those oily hands grasp onto the front of his robes, the tentacles twine around his wrists and ankles and he is dragged, forcibly, into a nearby pathway.

A negative pathway.

Dream lacks even the ability to scream as the foreign essences rip and tear into his mind, into his consciousness, into his core, which repells them like the foul substances they are, and he is pushed into them and torn away from them at once, split from himself in a blinding surge of forced affinity and failed empathy.

And then they emerge on the other side. Hairline fissures recede into Dream’s body, his soul. Faintly, he can make out the distant pulse of positives in the multiverse, but he is rent from them in such a way that he cannot reach them, he cannot _feel_ them as he ought, and _this_ feeling he knows all too well, as he reaches out and is met only with an invisible wall of cold, of dark, of despair. _Stone_.

Surprise flickers briefly across his captor’s face and he lets Dream go. But whatever remorse he might feel at the unintentional level of damage he has done to his brother is soon buried beneath an inexplicable barrier of rage, hatred and pain. “It’s not any fun, is it?” he taunts, unable to staunch completely the little flicker of concern that emanates from his soul, straight into the other’s perceptions.

“Night, you... you can’t leave me here.” All quarrels forgotten, Dream latches onto it, clawing desperately after the other, willing his mind away from reliving the horror of those thousand years of captivity. And then he notices - snow. Beneath his hands, his feet. This is…Snowdin? Then why…?

“Look around, Dream. This is what happens when you completely neglect one particular timeline because of your own selfish preferences.”

He tries to look, he really does. Casting about for any sign of life, of _joy_ to hold onto. But the only response comes from many timelines and universes away, muffled through that insurmountable stone barrier. He coughs, and dark, inky sludge rips up through his throat and out onto the snowy path before him. “Genocide,” he gasps and Nightmare snorts derisively from just above him.

“Almost. There’s only one left. Living here alone after having slaughtered the one who massacred all the others. Only there wasn’t any reset after that. Even that desire was quelled. And so nothing lives and nothing dies anymore, there’s only death, in the air, in the earth.”

“How… long…” Nightmare couldn’t have formed this sort of protective barrier around the whole universe without a great deal of unobstructed time and effort.

“Long enough. While you were off playing the good fairy on the surface level of _Underfell_ or some other paltry attempt at negativity. What’s the matter? Can’t you see how I’ve improved? Nothing gets in or out without my say. For a thousand or ten thousand years - it doesn’t matter. You least of all.”

Dream curls himself up into a ball on the ground, trying to hold himself together, to keep from shattering beneath the oppressive weight of pain and anguish bleeding into this place - bleeding in and never out. His voice barely makes it passed his teeth, carried out on another wave of nausea. “Night, just… just take a moment to think…” he retches again and gives up.

“You want to think? Try giving things a little thought when all you can feel is despair and misery, not just theirs but your own, and all of it feeding off itself till you’re ready to be sick only you _can’t_ get sick without throwing up yourself, your own insides just to be able to breathe without dying, without killing yourself. Try it, Dream. I’d like to see how long you’d last.”

He isn’t listening. He must not understand how this feels, that Dream is _dying_ and he won’t _stop_ dying until he gets out of here, until Nightmare takes him out on the wings of more negativity, more painful pathways Dream can endure if only he can get out of this place and never come back. And then Dream remembers that Nightmare is the author of pain, the keeper of death, and so he knows, he must sense every ounce of agony Dream is experiencing at this very moment, at any moment, and still he does nothing to help, to save him from the darkness. Dream tugs his golden shroud more tightly around his shoulders, fruitlessly seeking some sort of relief before closing his eyes and attempting to drift, to dwell in the distant pathways cascading through the multiverse just outside his reach and almost outside his perception.

Another harsh chuckle startles him back into the present. “You can’t even drift properly, can you? I guess it won’t be _quite_ like before.” And then he’s gone. Vanished into the darkness and Dream is left alone with himself and his memories.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/B-Q_EvIO2DA

“God _damn_ it, Dream, it’s only been an hour.”

An hour. Those words bite into his skull like barbed accusations. Any attempt at deceiving himself, at pretending he didn’t _know_ what this was doing to Dream, rings hollow in the darkness of his mind. His own essence makes a liar of him, made up as he is of pain and anguish and sorrow and death and guilt and pleading, so much pleading…

_“Without a soul…”_

No. Nightmare can feel a great deal. Though he has done many nonsensical things, not the least of which was today. In fact, he never has done something so terrible as what he did today; even locking Dream away for one thousand years in the heat of battle is nothing to this, taking hold of someone who _trusted_ him, who loved him, surely, even though he can’t feel it, he can’t ever feel that kind of thing and so he didn’t care, he didn’t let himself care as Dream wasted away before his eyes, within his soul.

Keepers of feeling cannot sleep, and Dream couldn’t even drift, not within this all new brand of hell Nightmare constructed as his own private sanctuary just before things changed, before Dream let himself drift unencumbered by his side beneath that tree, perfectly defenseless against any attack Nightmare might formulate, trusting that he _wouldn’t_ formulate it, because they hadn’t promised but they’d agreed, they’d _told_ each other they wouldn’t…

Dream doesn’t pull away when he approaches. He can’t. Because Nightmare, as counterintuitive as it might seem, is the only source of light, of compassion in this place. So Dream reaches up to put his arms around his brother’s neck when he kneels down, knowing that his rescue is imminent, even as his golden eye-lights have dwindled into tiny, dissociating pinpricks. Nightmare wastes no time in scooping him up off the ground and transporting them both out of the cold and the dark though he knows the journey might very well kill the other, since leaving him here surely will.

“I didn’t mean for it to go so far,” he whispers truthfully, uselessly as they emerge onto a peaceful, sunny knoll, uncertain if the other can hear him. But he doesn’t say he’s sorry because saying sorry doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t change anything and people only say that because _they_ want to feel better, they want reassurance and forgiveness they don’t deserve.

Dream has gone limp in his arms again after the return journey, and Nightmare sets him unceremoniously on the ground, casting about for the nearest town, the one he knows rests at the base of this mountain because he’s been there many times, though never in this attitude. The agony has receded a great deal, though this new numbness causes Nightmare more concern than anything else. Fresh cracks have rippled out over the bones of Dream’s arms and face, and he doesn’t seem to have the strength to sit up, curled on one side in the grass like he is. “Wait here,” Nightmare tells him, and almost laughs at the absurdity of his own words. But Dream uses what strength he has left to nod before closing his eyes, and Nightmare watches him drift away for a moment before warping down to a certain house in the middle of town, a house he knows well.

The door opens before he can reach it, and blue, starry eye-lights blink out at him curiously throughthe crack. “Nightmare? What are you doing here?”

He watches the brief hostility, the protective challenge fade away within that round, white face before Blue opens the door a bit more and steps out, doing his best to seem nonchalant and approachable. He must have heard about the agreement, the alliance Dream formed with Nightmare not a month before, though Nightmare fears he will once again have to revise his understanding of their relationship all too soon.

“It’s Dream,” Nightmare tells him shortly. “West of the path on Mt. Ebott. He might wanna stay with you for a while.”

“Huh?” Blue tugs the door shut behind him softly before slowly, gradually beginning to close the gap between them. Nightmare has no intention of letting him get that far. He vanishes in a splat of sludge just outside their front yard.

But still he lingers in the shade beneath the trees, feeding off the irritation emanating from some local, frustrated minimum-wage workers. Underswap is one of his least favorite universes, primarily because he can find so little to sustain him here. But still he watches and waits for Blue to arrive, scowling fiercely at Dream’s valiant efforts to sit up and smile when he does. He can hear the shouted exclamations, the patter of Blue’s feet on the ground as he charges toward his fallen friend and stops short just before he gets there.

“Dream, you - you’re hurt!”

“I’m fine.”

Nightmare isn’t sure why he expected any different. But at the very least he knows the external injuries don’t lie and Dream won’t be able to keep up that facade for long.

Blue has both hands up to his mouth in horror. But he’s edging slowly, resolutely closer to the other. “Your brother came to get me. I thought… Did he do this to you?”

For a moment he looks as though he’s going to concoct another falsehood, and Nightmare doesn’t exactly want to be around when he does. But at the last minute something shifts in Dream’s face and then he’s sobbing uncontrollably with his knees drawn up and Blue holding him and shushing and telling him it’s all going to be okay.

Nightmare leaves before they say anything more.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/xeZPs04JpaA

“Why so silent? Heh. I know you’re in there. Even if Dream doesn’t.”

Nightmare didn’t often come alone to the tree. But Dream hadn’t been around lately. So Nightmare had been left with his mother more times than he cared to count. And it was starting to bug him.

“I know you said we both had weaknesses and whatever. But I’m… kinda starting to see an imbalance, know what I mean?” He clutched his favorite book under one arm, a story about a monster who was born uglier than all the others, ugly and rejected. But this monster, he grew up to be beautiful one day, so that everyone loved him and felt bad for what they did. Naturally, the monster forgave them. And everyone was happy. “Think I’ll grow up like that someday, Momma? And they’ll stop saying things… and feeling so angry and hateful I can’t hardly stand it?”

The book was soggy and brown from where it had landed in the mud just an hour ago. Wrenched from his grasp by a particularly spiteful creature who lived in the village. The words were illegible now, though he knew them all by heart and didn’t need the pictures to see them inside his head.

Nightmare didn’t think he was ugly. But when he smiled it looked scarier than when he frowned. And darkness seemed to follow him wherever he went. He didn’t used to know it was so bad. Only Dream was different than he was. And he was different than Dream. That’s all. But now it seemed everyone fancied themselves like Dream, even though they really weren’t, and Dream believed it. Dream didn’t know their secret hearts, like Nightmare did. And he didn’t want Dream to know, either. They didn’t think any of those mean things when they looked at Dream. They seemed to like Dream as much as Nightmare did. So that was alright.

“Is this a true story, Momma?” He gestured with the tattered book in his hand. Watching another corner of a page peel off and float gracefully to the ground. “I know you said we can’t really sleep, and see things that aren't there, like other people. But the ones in these stories, they dream, Momma. And when things are especially bad they pray to wake up, and sometimes they do. If I wanted to wake up, do you think I could? Even for a minute. Just so I could see it’s not all really like this. I think I could live this way, Momma, sitting right here between these roots, if only I knew it weren’t all the same everywhere else.”

She didn’t answer him. She never answered him, and Nightmare was left to find the answers for himself.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/OCjvJoWrUSM

Nightmare isn’t sure why he keeps coming to their favorite spot, by the willow tree. Only pride kept him here that day he left Dream alone in the darkness, the full ten minutes and then another fifty more in some nearby corner of the multiverse, long after he realized he wasn’t half so angry as he’d thought but couldn’t give Dream the satisfaction of thinking it. Not that Dream could think anything, pressed as he was between all that is toxic, all that is poison to him. Nightmare shakes the memory of those cries, those feelings away. For once he cannot revel in the suffering of another, though still it’s there, it’s a part of him like every ounce of pain he’s ever inflicted upon anyone else.

It doesn’t help him forget, this ordinary universe with its ordinary tree, standing in silent judgement upon him where he sits at its roots alone, where there should be another to share its shade, its tranquility with him. Not that he feels at all tranquil now, unable to drift or even to read if he wanted, though he doesn’t want, not now. And though he can sense no sorrow, no shadow of death within the deep recesses of this tree, it reminds him of another, whose voiceless comfort, whose soundless condemnation once lurked within branches as real as these, dangling above him. But still he will keep coming, sitting and staring up into the foliage, waiting for he knows not what until it arrives, seeming straight and tall as a tree himself, carrying that innocuous staff in one hand, or perhaps leaning on it, and his face all set in an expression Nightmare cannot read.

It has only been three days, but still Dream comes at the start of their scheduled interval, radiating neither pain nor fear nor sadness, only the kind of feelings Nightmare can’t feel, or else none at all. Nightmare doesn’t get up when he arrives, only tilts his head back against the trunk and holds the other with his eyes as though daring him to come closer, to even attempt what he must have come to do. But when Dream does take a step forward and wobbles a little, or maybe a lot, Nightmare makes no move to stop or to steady him. No, it would be better for Dream to fall flat on his face than for Nightmare to catch him, to touch him with these corrupting hands that soiled almost the entire multiverse worth of kindness, of goodness he can’t replace.

“I know you’re sorry,” Dream tells him so that Nightmare doesn’t have to, because Nightmare won’t. And Nightmare doesn’t ask how he knows, because Dream would know that kind of thing, he must feel every ounce of concern, of compassion Nightmare is experiencing right now and can’t stifle for the life of him.

And Dream doesn’t fall down, only kneels on the ground beside him, with Nightmare sort of curling away without meaning to. He doesn’t think he could stand it if Dream tried to come any closer, and mercifully he doesn’t, only looks on in silence for a moment before bowing his head with an exhausted sigh that escapes him despite all obvious attempt to conceal it, though whether he’s wearied by the interaction or his injuries, it isn’t clear. Nightmare can see now that he’s down here beside him, those telltale bags under his eyes, the spidery scars almost faded to nothing already, the frayed and darkened edges of his aura that once glowed so fiercely at the fringes of his form.

“Why are you here?” Nightmare asks, perhaps more sullenly than he means to, and his eyes feel strange, like a whole new wellspring of sludge has sprung up to pool and spill from his eye-sockets, which wouldn’t surprise him in the least after what he’s done, though he can’t recall it ever feeling like this, even at the beginning when the stuff melted and choked him without mercy.

Perhaps Dream notices something strange too, for though he understands next to nothing of guilt or despair, tears are one thing he knows a great deal of, and he tilts his head a little, brow creasing with concern. Even so, the words that come from his mouth are indignant and defensive. “Why shouldn’t I be here? You don’t own this place, do you? Not yet, anyway.”

And that’s just great, Nightmare is itching for a fight, for some outlet to express all this mucked up rage inside him, though he’s more angry at himself than anyone else and can’t _do_ anything to himself so maybe he’ll do it to Dream, maybe he’ll shout at him and tell him what he really thinks, though he won’t lay a hand on him, he won’t hurt him because he’s hurt him enough and he’d never forgive himself if he did it more, not in another thousand years of penance. But when he opens his mouth all that comes out is a sob, a sound he thought he’d never make, all choked and breathy and _angry,_ he’s so angry he can’t stand it, at Dream, at his mother, at this place that doesn’t offer him any solace after all, not from what he’s done, not from the one whose shoulder he’s sobbing into, who should be pushing him away only he won’t, Dream just keeps right on holding him with one hand on his head and the other wrapped around his shoulders, tentacles and all, murmuring comforts like that stupid Blue skeleton on a far-off world.

“Nightmare,” Dream says at last, after the sobs have stilled and Nightmare is just focusing on taking one breath after another and trying not to make a bigger fool of himself than he already has. “I think we have to go home.”

“It hasn’t been t-ten minutes yet,” Nightmare replies automatically, cursing that slight tremor in his voice.

“I don’t mean back. I mean _home_.”

Nightmare doesn’t argue. He has known his was coming for a long time. Though that doesn’t mean he dreads it any less. “Are you well enough to go?” he asks instead, and pulls away just quick enough to catch that ghost of smile that flits across his brother’s face.

“I can manage.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What exactly went on during those three days Dream spent in Underswap?
> 
> Mood music if you want: https://youtu.be/FXdFqAirl4A

“You look a lot better,” Blue told him on that second day, straddling a dining room chair and peering with rueful fondness into his friend’s face.

Dream had insisted upon propping himself up a bit that morning, trying not to examine too closely the faded scars running along his hands and arms. He could only imagine what his face looked like, though Blue assured him the cracks were all but invisible now. Asgore was an excellent healer, after all. And it’s alright to let somebody else look after you once in a while, since you’re always so eager to take care of everybody.

That was what they thought of him. Selfless. Altruistic. Well, that was exactly what he was supposed to be, wasn’t it? He wasn’t supposed to let Nightmare hurt anyone, was he, and he couldn’t have done anything different, could he, or was it all his fault after all and if he’d have just kept his mouth shut they’d be fine right now and sitting under that tree like nothing happened, and maybe not that tree but the first one, with Nightmare just the same and _himself,_ without needing to change, to pretend he was something he wasn’t.

“But you shouldn’t have to be something _you’re_ not either, Dream,” Blue said softly. Repositioning that cool, damp cloth he kept placing and replacing on the other’s forehead. Dream hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud and now he smiled apologetically.

“Why do I not like that look,” Blue scolded, hunching his shoulders and grasping the back of his chair tightly enough to make the wood groan in protest. “You’re not planning on going off to see him on your own again any time soon I hope? Not till you’re better. I mean all the way better. And not without Ink or somebody there who can watch your back.”

Dream didn’t respond except to close his eyes wearily. Allowing his mind to wander idly along the gentle, affectionate pathways crisscrossing the house.

“He’s right.”

The new voice startled him. He hadn’t noticed Papyrus’ approach. It was difficult on the best of days to pick up any positive sentiments from the taller skeleton, and in the aftermath of what happened the day before, the great reverberation of despair that rocked every corner of the multiverse during that everlasting hour of torment, it was all but impossible. A thought that gave Dream not a little distress. “I’m… sorry,” he murmured weakly, and Blue scowled at his brother.

“Papy, we’re supposed to be making him feel _better._ Put that out.”

Papyrus dragged and flicked ashes, though whether he didn’t hear Blue or was simply ignoring him wasn’t clear. Dream was betting on the former, what with that distant, almost fevered look in his eyes. “It’s one thing to… wanna give somebody the benefit of the doubt. It’s another to practically give yourself up as some kinda offering of goodwill. Know what I mean?”

Papyrus wasn’t a bad sort. The resets just hit him harder than a lot of the others who knew about them. He was in a bad way for quite a while before, though nowadays he seemed almost contented at times. And as much as Dream didn’t want to argue, would rather discuss practically anything else, he couldn’t help but notice the hypocrisy in his words. “Would you give up, then? On your brother.”

Now Papyrus did look at him, instead of off at that far corner of the wall, and his face sort of creased with something Dream didn’t recognize. “Alright then. Have you bothered to try and understand the actual problem? Or are you too busy reacting to his behavior.”

Whatever Dream expected, it wasn’t this. His head hurt just thinking about it, but he was paying attention. If anyone could understand negative feelings, it was Papyrus, and Dream wasn’t about to let his opportunity pass him by, injuries or no. “What do you mean?”

Papyrus snorted, dragging again on his cigarette and leaning in the doorway leading to the kitchen. “He’s angry.”

“I kinda figured that.” Dream tried not to sound impatient. It was getting to him, the soreness, the pain still eating away at the edges of his aura. Asgore said it would fade, that he would recover himself eventually, even if he wouldn’t be exactly the same afterward, it would scar like the rest of him. 

“Yeah but have you thought about _why_?”

“I already told him I was sorry about all that stuff from before.”

Another snort, this one louder than the first. “Yeah, I heard about that. You apologized and threw a little fit and forced his hand, and now you think it’ll all go back to normal just like that? Sorry, but that kinda thing ain’t gonna go away after one hour of hugging it out.”

“He knows that, Papy,” Blue all but whispered, staring back at his brother with wide, reproving eyes. Dream had almost forgotten he was there. And apparently Papyrus had too, because he seemed to return to himself in an instant, and put his cigarette out.

“Yeah… Yeah I reckon he does,” he said, with a brief, slightly apologetic glance in Dream’s direction. “Welp. I’ll let you rest. I gotta go to work.”

“Thank you,” Dream murmured a little too late, after he’d already shut the door behind him.

“Wow.” Blue was staring, thunderstruck, after his brother. “You must’ve really struck a chord. Haven’t seen Pap go to work in forever.”

“Wasn’t trying to strike a chord,” Dream said, shifting a bit to get more comfortable and putting one arm up over his eyes.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Blue assured him, replacing that cloth again. “He gets like that sometimes. We both know you’ll do the right thing. Do you want anything?”

No, Dream didn’t want anything. And he was letting it bother him, a great deal. But it was okay to be bothered, once in a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this little Underswap cameo chapter... I just couldn't help but write it.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/FqWixE_2_CE

It stands like some gaudy tribute to a time that never was. Stone walls, marble pillars, and a row of pearly steps, all chiseled with precision, engraved with swirling symbols of the sun and the stars, of war and of peace.

Dream stretches out one tiny, bony hand to trace along the edge of a chariot wheel, carved into the bottommost step. “Was this here last time we were?” And his voice is hushed like he’s fearful of disturbing, disrespecting this massive monument.

“Don’t think so,” comes the curt reply. Nightmare makes no move to climb those glistening steps, to enter that massive sanctuary, but only gazes on with bewildered, almost wondering disappointment at this ludicrous spectacle, this gluttonous waste of a testimonial where it crushes and violates the very ground it’s meant to honor.

“Do you want to go in?” The quiet voice beside him. Familiar and calming, reminding and painful. No, Nightmare doesn’t want to go in, doesn’t want to be here at all. But he promised he would, that he’d see this through, so he lets the other lead the way, up those marble steps for lack of a preferred and beaten trail of dewy grass and firm, packed soil. Somewhere far below, sagging beneath this destructive, desecrating weight, lies a once plain and green little hill, proud back then to bear its natural burden. Now it is stone like he is, like he makes, all cold and empty and unfeeling, holding the past not sacred but removed, destroyed and profaned by something newer, something harsher and safer.

Somewhere between the first step and the last Nightmare stops counting, stops paying attention to how far they’ve come, how much they have still yet to go. There is only the clack of his feet on the steps, the brush of his tentacles behind, and the soundless, steady ascent of the one beside him. Nightmare never noticed how little noise Dream makes when he walks, that he almost seems to hover over the ground before setting his foot upon it as though fearful it will all turn to nothing before he can. But Dream isn’t afraid. His face is clear and eyes untroubled, even as that first, distant rumble of thunder reverberates through the muggy, stifling air. Nightmare can feel it crackling in the sky above, the ground below. But Dream doesn’t stall, doesn’t shudder, and Nightmare knows he doesn’t need any help, that Dream never needed any help from him, and even as children in the night, in the dark, Dream was more a comfort to him than anything, Dream alone reminded him there was more to feeling, more to _life_ than only feeling bad things, than people doing bad things to him.

Even so he can’t stop himself from saying it. “Remember, we can take a break if you need to.”

Dream doesn’t reply. Only keeps right on climbing and Nightmare with him, until they reach the top and there’s the dark, marble hall before them and the last rays of the sun behind, illuminating dimly their halting progress. The morning and the evening, once cloven cleanly by the dawn, by the dusk, breaking and dying in a gracious, flawless cycle. Now thunder comes in early, encroaching on the day, and light seeks to linger, scorching at the night.

“Dream, I don’t want to be here. It’s all wrong.” It’s all wrong like we are.

Dream shrugs, and that faint halo around him is still darkened, retreated beneath a purplish, bruised miasma that may never fade. Even his smile is different. “It doesn’t have to be right.”

And something about that is really funny coming from Dream, who is perhaps the only _right_ thing in the entire multiverse. But Nightmare doesn’t really want to laugh, he just wants to get it over so he can leave, and so he does, stepping back into the hall, the temple built not for them but for a safe and distant memory, an innocuous past, a comfortable legend.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/FqWixE_2_CE

Marble floors and sputtering candles. Painted walls and the heady, muddling scent of incense. Even Dream’s footsteps echo on the stone as they walk, almost shuffle through the hall. Shadowy reflections flicker over the glossy sheen of the floor. Off to one side, sectioned by a shimmering golden chord, lie the two broken halves of a crumbled, hollowed-out stone pillar. Dream spares it only a single glance as they pass, but Nightmare can’t stop staring, transfixed by the first of his many instruments of torment, a cage so tiny it’s a wonder even Dream fit inside it for so long, though they were younger then, the both of them, no more than twelve and so naive, so impassioned and reckless.

Dream slows up ahead, eyes carefully averted to an illustration of a hill on one wall. He doesn’t turn or urge him on, only idles a bit in his course. It is for each of them to choose how long they will linger, and where. Nightmare only catches up when they are nearly to the end, where a tiny silver statue is waiting with elegant poise before an alter and a basin and a whole row of little candles. She is bent just a little, delicate fingers clasped tightly around a marbly fruit. Hair like foliage and arms like branches, she all but kneels with benevolent supplication furrowed in her brow. Dried leaves dust the basin at her feet and within the fruit is split an interlocking pattern of gold and darkness, a symbol of balance and peace.

Without realizing it the two of them have drawn closer together as they approach, peering down at the little woman on the platform. “Is that… what she looked like? Before.”

Before… what? Before she was nothing but a russet stain caked in the bark of a gnarled old tree? “You’d know as well as I would,” Nightmare mutters evasively.

But neither of them can recall now and so Dream lets it pass, only gazes at her with something like reverent interest while Nightmare shifts uncomfortably, casting about for something else to focus on. It doesn’t take him long to find it. A great tapestry, hanging just behind her at the back wall, thrown mostly in shadow now though he can still just make it out in the flickering glow. On the right is the blue and purply design of of a beast with eyes like a serpent and a tail like one too, though the body is formed all of feathery clumps. Gleaming talons jut out of its paws and pearly fangs peak from its gaping maw. And just opposite, the embroidered figure of an angel, all ruby and amber, hands folded to its chest and eyes closed in serene meditation. The contrast is stern, splitting the fabric in a radical incompatibility of colors and design, and all the while that quiet, gentle statue in between, pleading, wishing, hoping, waiting.

“Seems right,” Dream murmurs just beside him, and Nightmare snorts.

“Just about,” he agrees, and then they both start giggling and can’t stop.

“What, you do have fangs.”

“Barely. And where’re your wings?”

“It’s artistic license.”

“Artistic license my ass. You’ve never once looked like that, especially not now.”

Dream is in stitches beside him and Nightmare is grinning only it’s different than his usual grin, it almost hurts his face to do it. The pain and amusement roll off them in waves even as Dream makes an effort to sober up, to kneel down respectfully and reach out his hand for the little pile of leaves. His eyes are still glowing and his face still slanted in a smile as he takes up a handful, careful not to crush them as they sift between his fingers. At his hand, then up his arm and around his whole body flickers a little pulse of golden light. Purple fades to gray and stays there on the fringes, clinging like a ragged layer of dead skin he can’t shed, and Nightmare’s face twists. He isn’t sure what he was expecting. Perhaps a miraculous healing, a restoration of all that was before. But still the gold turns to silver, the light fades to darkness, and though Dream smiles he is anything but calm, Nightmare can feel the beat of his panic before it quells, stilled beneath another lie, another facade of wellbeing.

“Well. That’s that,” Dream huffs, looking up at him and smiling wider, and Nightmare fights the urge to flip that basin, to kick it so the leaves scatter and he can crush them beneath his feet.

“Like hell it is,” he gets out, and Dream’s smile falters, quivers before Nightmare turns on one heel and stomps out with a hiss of dragging tentacles and a rumble of careless steps.

The wind moans and the rain splatters like ice on the pavement. It’s mostly dark now but for that stubborn glow on the horizon. Nightmare all but wraps himself in that cold, in that darkness, and huddles on the top step, glaring into the storm. He barely notices when Dream is beside him, standing too on that top step, just out from the cover of the pillars so the rain hits him.

“I hate her,” Nightmare says, just loudly enough to be heard over the downpour, and his voice is blurry.

Dream shivers but makes no move to tighten his cloak, the hug himself or step back. “Nightmare, it’s… fine.” His voice is like it was when he was a child. Quiet and unassuming. An infuriating attempt to calm.

“It’s not fine. It’s bullshit, look at you. That’s _healing_?”

“It is healed, it’s just scarred, I don’t feel anything - ”

“She might as well have left you like you were,” Nightmare insists stubbornly, staring out at that almost-dark sky while his tentacles jerk and twitch in agitation.

Dream sinks down to sit on the step, still out under the rain, and Nightmare flops down too. “Is that why you didn’t…”

Nightmare doesn’t answer, only keeps glaring at nothing and everything and gritting his teeth. Of course he didn’t touch those leaves, they couldn’t fix Dream and they wouldn’t fix him, she’d never fixed him because she _made_ him this way, and that’s fine, he’s just fine the way he is, thank you very much.

And something in that sentiment must be positive by some arbitrary standard of the universe because Dream smiles a little at him when he senses it. “You’re right. We don’t need fixing. Either of us.”

Nightmare makes a derisive sound and watches the rain mingle with slime as it makes its way down his arms and his hands. “You really are a liar,” he says, but it’s somewhat fond and he can’t help that. A little wave of guilt, of sorrow, and he realizes the little streams that run down his brother’s face are made up of tears now too, and Dream is shuddering from more than just the cold. Nightmare sighs. “Dream, I didn’t mean…”

“I am though,” he wails with startling volume and puts his head in his hands. “I told you I would try, that I’d listen to you and I didn’t, I just kept telling you to do what I wanted and be what I wanted and now we’re like this and it’s my fault.”

“You’re like that because I tried to force you to get how I felt and you still couldn’t ‘cause you’re you.” Nightmare realizes it himself even as he says it, reaching out to put an arm around Dream like he did when they were kids and the storms came, the dark came, the sorrow like a deluge. “You’re you and I’m me and that’s just the way it is.”

And all at once Dream smells of death. Not the imminent and terrified kind but the longed-for stuff, the sort of thing Nightmare felt way back in that garbage dump by the falls. “Hey,” he splutters, startled, and gives Dream a shake, none too gentle. “What’s _that_ about? It can’t be that bad.” And this isn’t his job, to hold this off, but Dream hasn’t been doing it very well lately, with anyone, so who’s gonna do it if Nightmare won’t and Dream can’t? But Dream doesn’t answer, only slumps unmoving against his shoulder and so Nightmare sits there too, listening to that despair and glowering, doing his best to choke it off before it bleeds back out of him and into its host with reinforcements. Because if anyone’s a liar he is, killing this thought before it can form, killing his _own_ thoughts before they can form, the positive ones, because he’s a lot better at strangling his feelings than Dream is, right? Within his soul is not a dammed up pool but a desert, a dried up pit of what he doesn't feel for fear of running out, what he doesn't say for fear of being caught in a lie by the one who understands those feelings far better than he does and would hear, would see if he was telling the truth or if he wasn’t. And that’s just silly now, isn’t it, since the very source of those feelings is sitting beside him. Dream _exists_ to make sure those emotions never run out, to make sure the multiverse, to make sure everyone, to make sure _Nightmare_ never runs out of those feelings and can express them as much as he wants. Because they’re _family,_ they’re brothers first and keepers second, and what they do might be bigger than just them, but it begins with them, whether they like it or not. “I haven’t tried much either,” he admits in a whisper. Because though he has made a token effort these past weeks to let himself _seem_ happy once in a while, that desert is still there, barren and dry, and even now as he tries to dig it up he fears his own emotions will call him a liar, that whatever he expresses won’t be felt and Dream will know, Dream will see it’s a sham.

“I love you too,” comes the sullen reply, a response to his feelings not his words, just like they were taught not todo from the beginning,since most people wouldn’t get it. But Nightmare isn’t most people and so he almost laughs at how grudging, how hostile it is, like a child’s forced apology or maybe an _I-told-you-so,_ followed by a loud sniff. But still that darkness is there, it lingers on like the faded scars at the edge of Dream’s aura. And how far has Nightmare let things go to let it happen, to make _this_ happen to somebody he really does love so much or else Dream wouldn’t have felt it, wouldn’t have answered.

“Remember when you said…” Dream’s voice is dull and toneless, almost startlingly so after his outburst earlier. “Remember when you said you wished this was all a bad dream… so you could wake up.”

Nightmare freezes. “You… heard that?” he says, and what a stupid question to ask because obviously Dream did or else he wouldn’t have said so.

“I didn’t know what you meant back then. Guess I do now.”

Somehow Nightmare can’t be glad about that. It’s what he wanted before, isn’t it, though now he wishes he didn’t, that he hadn’t tried to make it happen. “Well, I don’t… feel that way anymore,” he stutters clumsily, and could he say anything more selfish, considering all the damage he’s done, how much worse he’s made this hill than the temple did, how many years Dream stood in darkness that now clings like a shroud he can’t shake, and all because of Nightmare. And he understands why Dream wants to die, though Dream shouldn’t and he should only he doesn’t want to, not after everything.

They sit in silence for a while. Each listening to the strange, alien emotions coming from the other. Then, “Really?” Dream resumes like no time has passed. And he seems a little lighter.

Nightmare considers his words carefully, something he hasn’t done in a long while. “Yeah.” It’s all he comes up with. He watches the weak pulse of Dream’s aura. It occurs to him that Dream lost both a mother and something like a father in the place. “We don’t have unlimited tries anymore.”

Dream sneezes.

Nightmare laughs and gets up. “Ok, are you done trying to prove something or are you gonna stay out here till you get your wish?”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New warning/tag: Swearing. (Probably should've added this earlier xd...)

Dream doesn’t want to leave. If he leaves he might never come back and so he shoots down that suggestion before the other even makes it.

He shrugs his hood off when they step back into the shelter of the temple. The robe is completely dry, like always, but he was sitting just right for the rain to hit his face anyway, he made sure of that.

“You’ve sure got a lotta use out of that,” Nightmare remarks, pointlessly flicking the water from his tentacles and leaving little splatters of mud all over the floor. And something about the way he says that makes Dream want to take it off but he doesn’t, he hasn’t taken it off in thousands of years, not since Nightmare decided it suited Dream better than it suited their tree. Woven of sunlight and impervious to every kind of darkness and cold, it was left in Nightmare’s care, a protection from the phantoms of the night, the delusions of the day, but he never wore it, he only gave it right back to her and then to Dream. Come to think of it, maybe that was Nightmare’s first step away from her, taking the scarf back like a scorned gift, though he scorned it first.

When Dream doesn’t respond, Nightmare starts talking again. “Surprised they let you come back by yourself.”

“Yeah, well, they almost didn’t,” Dream snaps with sudden venom. Nightmare has never been chatty in his life, so why now? And all at once Dream wants his space, or as much of it as he can get, and perhaps Nightmare senses it. No, he definitely does because the sudden violence of it takes even Dream by surprise, and Nightmare backs away, settling himself in one corner while Dream takes the opposite, the one farthest from him and by the statue, the little woman at the basin.

He sits and watches her, wanting to drift, to forget all of this and wander among the positive pathways emanating from a nearby town, the new and fragile ones radiating with tenuous caution from his brother. But he can’t do that, he can’t just leave because he knows Nightmare must be feeling a lot more than just positive things, only Dream can’t understand, he’ll never understand according to Nightmare and so he just sits here uselessly, not even trying because trying won’t work, that’s what Nightmare said. Only it feels like dying not to, since it’s the one thing he’s good at it, trying - Dream has been trying all his life.

Nightmare’s eyes are closed now but he’s not drifting. Dream can see the concentration in his face where he sprawls in that corner by the open entrance, tentacles splayed around him as he sits crosslegged in an almost meditative pose. No, he’s busy stifling, crushing Dream’s outburst of despair from earlier on the steps, the pain that even now recedes like a dull echo, more of a distant memory of someone else’s emotion than his own. But the rage is near and present as it pools in his soul at the realization. How dare Nightmare try to manipulate his emotions at a time like this? With a slap of his palm on the marble and a murderous glare, Dream sends off a rush of anger, of resentment, of _get-away-from-me_ into that corner.

Nightmare doesn’t react right away, but soon enough he’s smiling a little as he opens his eyes. “Sorry. Old habit.”

A _very_ old habit. For the past, what, two-thousand years? Nightmare has made it his life’s work to awaken, to _antagonize_ Dream’s negative emotions, not quiet them. But already it’s flowing freely again, the ugly truth, that despair of life itself, right back into Dream’s soul like a living death. Nightmare has let go. And he has this infuriating look on his face, like a parent whose child is reaping the consequences of their own choices, and Dream hates that look so much because it’s the same one he’s been giving Nightmare for two-thousand years.

So when he starts crying like a baby again, just as he always does, they are tears of rage this time and Nightmare doesn’t get up to comfort him, which is the only thing Dream is glad of right now in this miserable cycle of guilt and injured pride. “Why’d you have to break open that tree,” he sobs, much to his own surprise. He thought he’d forgiven Nightmare long ago for all of that. It’s what he told Neil, that he can’t resent someone who lives with that kind of pain, that he only wants his brother back and nothing else, if he got him back he wouldn’t resent him, he wouldn’t say a word about the past.

But for once Nightmare takes it without a fight, only watches Dream with something indescribable in his eyes, something Dream might be able to read if he wasn’t so fucking miserable right now, if he wasn’t drowning in emotions he wasn’t supposed to feel, that Nightmare was supposed to feel for him. So he just keeps sobbing loudly into the stillness, and all the while Nightmare waiting, just waiting for him to be done and saying nothing because there’s nothing he can say, not now.

And then, when the sobs have dwindled to a wretched hiccuping - “Please don’t be mad at me anymore,” Dream pleads pathetically, like he hasn’t just cut Nightmare as deeply as he could.

“I’m not, Dream.” The response is so quiet and gentle it almost sounds like… something he can’t place, something he’s forgotten centuries ago or more. And is it the truth? Dream wouldn’t know, Dream will never know because he can’t understand him, even trying to understand left him like this, all corrupted and mangled, isn’t that what Nightmare said about him, about himself?

And so he just sits the rest of the night in silence, trying to believe his brother’s words, because words are all he has now.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: https://youtu.be/cS6XY7yzD3s

Dream is ill by morning. He can tell by how weak he is, by the pain in his mouth and throat, the ache of his head, the chill in his chest and the telltale, stuffy sound of his breath.

Not to mention his face is all swollen from crying still.

Nightmare’s new, positive feelings have retracted somewhat. Which should be no surprise considering how Dream spoke to him while they were still so raw, while Dream _knew_ they were raw, that Nightmare was vulnerable and that’s why he did it right then, so it would hurt, so he would feel what Dream felt.

He sighs. It is going to be a long while before either of them can give that up completely.

But maybe it’s not as bad as all that, perhaps Nightmare is just resting and that’s why his feelings are so muted, since his knees are drawn up and his head down upon them, tentacles curled around him on the floor like he’s some kind of big cat. Though if he is drifting, it’s not very far because he looks up right away when Dream steps closer, and smiles in a way that is unmistakably tender. “Hey, bro.”

Dream isn’t sure how to react, except to wonder if maybe his brother has gone mad, or if perhaps Dream has because he heard it. He’s suddenly seized by a fit of coughing, which sounds a lot worse than it feels, and Nightmare’s smile slips. Dream glares at him when he’s done, as though daring him to say anything about it, but he doesn’t. Doesn’t even hint at going back either, except to mutter something about somebody probably coming over here from town any minute to take care of these candles, so they should get out of the temple at the very least.

If they were anywhere else they wouldn’t have to worry about being seen if they didn’t want to, but this is their place of origin, their world if not their home, and so they are more solid here, more real than in any other.

Dawn has fully broken by the time they reach town. Dream insisted on walking so they did, and now a few monsters are already out, a foxy looking one on his way to work, and a rabbit over there walking her child on a leash. It smells of stone and soot and rain. Some of the roads aren’t paved, and Dream goes down one of those, ducking into a sort of alley when he sees somebody coming, an old feline monster he can’t help but watch around the corner as he passes. And when he’s gone Dream has to deal with Nightmare staring at him, Nightmare wondering what that was about or maybe not. So he sits himself down on the curb, reaches for a handful of gravely dust from the street, and sifts it through his fingers like those leaves.

“What was it like. When you woke up.” Nightmare says it conversationally, and it’s as though a knot has loosened in Dream’s soul, when Nightmare gives him permission to speak, to speak about that.

“I…didn’t really see a lot of what went on out here,” he says truthfully, with a cautious glance up at his companion. Why doesn’t Nightmare sit down? “Neil shielded me from most of it, while I recovered. I was really weak and… confused.” Dream stops, assessing his audience. Nightmare is gazing up the alley at the next street, which is now bustling with a steady flow of traffic. Mostly cars and pedestrians but, oddly, a wagon here and there. Dream clears his throat. “So, yeah, I guess there was dancing in the streets and all that but I didn’t really see any of it.”

Nightmare smiles a little and turns those keen, bright eye-lights on him again. He wants Dream to continue.

Another cough, and he does. “I didn’t realize how much time had passed. I didn’t know anybody, except Neil. He acted like he knew me all along though. It didn’t matter to him…what I was. He didn’t care I was a keeper… except how it affected me. I was like his own kid, he said. He used to have one, I think. I didn’t… know what that meant. Or how to act. It’s not like… It’s not like it was anything like being with a tree.” Dream laughs and swipes his sleeve over his eyes.

He didn’t notice the strange look on Nightmare’s face until now, that he’s leaning on the opposite wall and focusing on the ground. Dream has to think for a moment to put a name to it, like he does with most negative emotions. Envy? “He would’ve liked you, Night, if you’d been…” But then he stops, because Dream has never been a good judge of who would and wouldn’t like Nightmare. _Dream_ always liked Nightmare and so he just assumed everyone would.

But Nightmare only turns away a little, looking back up to that street. “Thanks for telling me about it.”

And Dream realizes there’s so much more they have yet to tell each other, so many years they haven’t covered, and he wants to ask Nightmare some questions too, about what he was doing all that time Dream was here, but he doesn’t because it isn’t the right time, there’s plenty of time and for some reason that makes him really happy, that they have so much they can talk about, even if some of it is sad.

“I didn’t mean to do it, you know,” Nightmare offers then. Dream doesn’t have to ask what he means, but he listens with rapt attention, waiting for him to elaborate. Nightmare shoots a rueful, slightly warped grin in his direction before scuffing one heel on the ground. “I mean, I meant to do _something._ And it wasn’t anything good. But then when it happened and you were… And I couldn’t figure out how to get you back out again, not that I would’ve been nice if I had but… yeah.”

Dream isn’t sure what to do with this information. He’s always suspected it was a whim at the very least, an impulsive decision on Nightmare’s part. But that he couldn’t get him out after, that he wanted to... That’s news to him.“I see,” is all he manages to say, and Nightmare’s shoulders sag like he’s been holding his breath.

And suddenly Dream knows something, he knows it as surely as he’s sitting here, or getting up, now. And he wants Nightmare to know it too, if he doesn’t already, and so he goes over there and Nightmare hugs him back like he’s been waiting for it, even though he shouldn’t have known, shouldn’t have been able to sense it was coming. “It’s gonna be alright,” Dream tells him, letting him in on it, on this wonderful discovery he’s only just made, and Nightmare huffs a laugh against his shoulder.

“You’re gonna give me your cold.”


	12. Chapter 12

“Dream!” Ink pukes all over his latest sketch. “How are you?”

The Doodle Sphere. A place Dream has no difficulty locating. Differentiating between which feelings Ink is actually experiencing and the ones he keeps in the vials is all but impossible, and Dream gave up trying a long time ago. But he can always feel a great many positive emotions here at any given time, whether Ink does or not, a fact that seems to give the scatterbrained artist not a little satisfaction.

“Well, I have a cold.” Dream coughs for emphasis and settles himself down across from Ink with the messy pile of drawings between them. Ink is busy trying to recover what is left of the one he just sullied. He never abandons a sketch. “But if you mean the other stuff… it's alright.”

“Is it going to get better?”

Dream can’t tell whether he means the cold or things with Night. He decides it doesn’t matter. “Yeah. Eventually.”

Ink is biting his pen and glaring fiercely at the canvas, trying to figure out how to incorporate the inky splatter into his original vision. Dream smiles a little and closes his eyes. It’s nice, comfortable for him here. The heady atmosphere of undiluted emotions without aim or variance, the scratch of pencil on paper, the distracted air of the other, requiring nothing, offering nothing, just a presence. A friend, maybe, when Dream can let go his pride. It never fails but every time Dream arrives, a miniature waterfall of blackish fluid jettisons onto whatever Ink happens to be doing. Even that time Dream came back sulking and ready for round two of their… argument. Only to find that if he wanted to fight with anyone, it would have to be Broomy, since its master wasn’t biting. If Ink has taught Dream anything, it’s the power of forgetting, of letting go and Dream wishes he had learned it long before.

So he’s a little startled when he opens his eyes to find a pair of neon exclamation marks hovering in their sockets just a few inches from his face. “What happened to your aura?”

Dream yelps and backpedals as best he can with Ink on all fours and closing the distance again before he can even make it. Dream gives up. “It’s… a long story. I thought I told you?”

“It was purple.” Ink’s voice comes in a monotone. “Why’s it gray now.”

“It’s… healed more? It… scarred.” Dream utters the last word with a defeated sigh and drops his gaze. But Ink continues to stare, and his eyes have gone almost white. And whether it’s the scrutiny, the pressure for an explanation, or the explanation itself, Dream knows he’s going to cry again before he does, that tears are rising inexplicably in his sockets. It’s been a long day, a long week, a long month and he doesn’t think he can keep it together anymore, not that he has been, but this is pretty much the only person with whom he hasn’t made a fool of himself, yet, so why does he have to loose it now? A single, golden tear escapes down his cheek and that, rather than his answer, seems to satisfy the other. Ink draws back as hastily as he advanced and now he’s digging around through his sketches again.

“By the way,” Dream starts shakily, straightening and doing his best to regain some dignity. “You didn’t open the portal today.”

Ink’s eyes blank out as he freezes momentarily in the midst of his frantic search. “What portal?”

Dream chuckles despite himself. They may have had their differences, some of them quite severe, but he knows Ink well enough to be sure that if he forgot something like this it’s probably because he decided it doesn’t matter, for now. “Hey, we like it there, you know,” Dream protests playfully. “It’s the first time you’ve forgotten in like a month.”

All at once Ink snags one particular page and slaps it in Dream’s direction with a flourish. Dream takes it hesitantly. It’s a muddled watercolor, sketched in pencil and splashed over with vibrant hues. Ink’s favorite kind of art. In the middle of a minimally detailed alleyway, a murky figure with about twelve limbs embraces another, made all of gold and sorrow.

Dream isn’t sure what to say. Ink has already returned to his current project, chewing that pencil again and glowering. Finally, Dream wipes at his eyes and clears his throat. “Thank you.”

Ink’s head snaps up blearily. “For what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed another cameo chapter :)


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New content warning: Bullying

Apparently the squid decided to create the portal today because they both manage to get through around the appointed time.

“What, did he forget how to think yesterday.”

“Stop,” Dream protests mildly, and though he looks relaxed, even happy as he trudges up that hill, there’s something in the air, something coming off his soul that is anything but. Nightmare decides not to be curious. Any digging might seem like meddling now, and he told Dream he wouldn’t do that. Besides, the dead feeling is gone, at least for now. He can almost ignore the gray clutching at the gold. Almost.

Somebody set up a picnic table a little way off the path, out from under the tree and in the sun where fewer bugs would bother the people who eat there. It strikes him as a little odd when Dream makes for it and sits down, waiting expectantly. Does he really want to talk that way? Face to face, without any convenient distractions between them? Welp. That’s progress, maybe.

Nightmare takes a seat across from him, glancing nervously around the park. Not very many people out right now. Nightmare isn’t sure if anyone here would see them even if they wanted it. Blind as bats, most of them.

Dream seems to be steeling himself for something. His hands clench and unclench together on the table. Nightmare watches them instead of his face. He’s still getting used to this old sense of vulnerability, of feelingthings he doesn’t want to just because somebody, because Dream says something.

“Well… can we address the elephant in the room?” Dream says at last, a poor attempt at nonchalance.

And Nightmare has no idea what he means. “Which one?” he tries, earning a snicker from the other, though it’s more nerves than amusement.

“I mean your… world.”

Ah. Nightmare should’ve realized this would come up, sooner or later. It’s Dream’s _job_ , isn’t it? His self-appointed duty. And he hasn’t abandoned it, however much time they’ve been wasting lately on themselves. “He’s too far gone for Omega,” Nightmare supplies curtly.

Dream falls silent, since he probably already knew that. Nightmare studies the cracks in the table. Dream takes another breath. “If it’s like that it’s a wonder he hasn’t…”

Well, so long as they’re being honest. “He has. I let up on the darkness whenever he got close. So he never went through with it. Doesn’t even try anymore, actually.”

Dream is horrified. Nightmare can feel that, loud and clear.

“Look, I don’t…” Nightmare passes a hand over his eyes. “Why does it bother you so much? It’s only one timeline.”

That was the wrong thing to say. “Yeah, well, you’re only one person too, and how would you like it if…” Dream splutters, unsure how to continue, too outraged to form a coherent argument.

And Nightmare is angry too. Why does it have to be like this, their first day back and they’re already at each other’s throats? But it’s not them, it’s not Dream and it’s not Nightmare, it’s everybody else, everybody tugging and pulling and yanking on them even when they’re here, even when they’re supposed to be taking a break. “Dream, whatever your little friend managed to do way back then for you isn’t gonna work on that place, ok, it’s like a fortress now.” He can’t help but feel a little proud when he says it. Good thing the other won’t notice.

Dream is deathly silent. Nightmare sneaks a glance at his face and realizes what he just said. If only words could be retracted, too.

“Dream, I’m…”Apologies. “It doesn’t even matter. It is what it is. Thought we agreed… to let me do my job and you do yours, right?”

“It is my job,” he snaps, not missing a beat. “It is my job to make sure people don’t suffer, needlessly, for all of eternity because of what you do, whether you mean it or not.”

There it is. Nightmare’s own words, his own confession thrown back at him. Just one day after he made it. Must be some kind of record. “Anything else you wanna go over?” he deadpans.

Dream blinks. “You can’t be serious.”

“How else should I be with a knife in my back?”

“What? That’s…”

“That’s what? That’s rich, coming from me, isn’t it? What else am I not allowed to say, Dream? While we’re on the topic.”

Dream is trembling. Uncertainty spills off him in waves. “We’re not on that topic at all… I was just…”

Nightmare is having none of it. “What, you got somebody waiting on you? The squid? Doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of his plans, is that it? Or maybe those nosy goodie-goodies in your precious swap timeline?”

“No, I… Nobody told me to…” Nightmare can feel the desperation, the panic building in his brother’s soul.

He forgets to care. “It’d be artificial alteration to change anything now. And that’s just what we decided not to do.”

“But if you hadn’t messed with it in the first place - ”

“Too late.” Just like old times. "He's too far gone. And I don't kill people."

Dream laughs. It’s unexpected, barbed and derisive. Like the snickers of the village children, looming over him where he sprawls in the street, in a puddle, or when he’s pinned against a wall, held up beneath the arms so they can hit him, so they can jeer at him and only stop when they feel like it, when the fury, the self loathing ebbs back out of them, and Nightmare both the source and the recipient of those feelings. He’d spend hours in his own head after that, trying to find where their thoughts ended and his began, why their hearts closed and his just broke. And Dream might take that dirt in his hand, between his fingers, but he’ll never taste it, he’ll never taste the blood and the dust and the shame, however much he might try, trying doesn’t work, like when Dream would hunker down with his elbows on one of the roots that that stuck up just perfect to curl against if you wanted to hide, to hide from the world. “What happened?” he’d say. “Why don’t you want to go to town? Did you fall again?” Yeah, he fell again, Nightmare fell a whole lot and said he fell a whole lot, that was all, and Dream never knew, never heard it, never _did_ anything about it.

But when Nightmare comes to himself, Dream isn’t laughing anymore, he’s only sitting in silent resentment across from him at an old picnic table in a gray world, though Nightmare can still hear it in his head, that three-thousand-year-old sound, and it’s only with great difficulty he gets the words out passed his teeth.

“Dream, let’s… Let’s not do this.” He reaches out for his brother’s hand. It’s shaking.

If Nightmare didn’t know better he’d think Dream was drifting, the way he stares and doesn’t see. “Then how…” He blinks and he’s there again, present but bewildered. “How are we going to resolve it?”

Dream is a fixer. It’s all he’s ever known, all he’s ever been. If he’s not fixing something, be it a broken relationship or a corrupted timeline, he doesn’t know who he is. And listening to that confusion, that crisis of identity, that flounder for control and underneath it all the muddling ache of illness making everything worse, Nightmare softens. They’ve really done a number on him the past couple of days, these gentler emotions. And he wonders what would’ve happened if he’d taken Dream up on his offer to come here before, last time they had a fight. If he’d relented instead of doubling down. But it only breaks him further, to think of that, and not with positives but negatives, the kind that make you weak and sorry instead of harsh and angry.

“Dream, I don’t…” And he stops because it’s difficult to say this kind of thing when you’re empathizing with somebody, empathizing and not antagonizing, not just consuming their feelings. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to resolve everything.”

Dream is about two seconds away from bursting into tears when he decides not to, Nightmare can tell. His whole face twitches as he swallows. His whole body trembles when he turns away. “Right.”

And Nightmare thinks that might be the end of it until Dream straightens up again, for one more effort, one last try.“But it’s your responsibility…”

“Dream, I… I heard you the first time, ok?”

Dream is visibly conflicted, silently wrestling with himself, with the part of him that can’t let go. “Ok.”

And Nightmare isn’t sure why he says it, whether it’s that anguished feeling or the fact that Dream kept himself from protesting despite it. But, “I’ll think about it.” The words are out before he can stop them, only this time he doesn’t want to take them back, not for anything.

When Dream laughs again, it’s different.


	14. Chapter 14

Nightmare isn’t sure when he starts weakening his own creation. Chipping away at just one spot until it gives, until it breaks clean through. Whatever he might have told Dream, he has learned a thing or two during these past two-thousand years, about himself, about his abilities, and not just how to get stronger.

This world has been isolated, suffocated on its own misery for so long that even the barest traces of positivity, the faintest idea that anything good could exist outside of itself only serves to eclipse the despair, the agony that permeates the air.

Sans is dying.

It’s almost funny how an instant of hope does him in faster than a lifetime of despair, how the reminder of something better is enough to break him with lack of it, and Nightmare knows that though he hasn’t killed him directly, drowned him in a pool of negativity, it’s the same as though he has, to create such a cruel contrast. And the funniest thing of all?

He didn’t mean to do it.

What delusions of virtue held him together even as he cultivated a living death with one inhabitant? He gives them what they want, surely, but he doesn’t kill people. And when he made it so Sans wanted to die, he wouldn’t let him, so no one died from what he did to them and he was free, his hands were clean of just that impurity, if only since childhood, when he did a lot of things he couldn't help.

So when he passes through the portal he’s a mess, just like that day he got a soul. Dream can tell before he even says anything, and it’s that wary recognition in his eyes that almost breaks, almost destroys Nightmare on the spot. “Can you…come with me,” he gasps helplessly, and Dream steps a little closer down that hill like Nightmare is at all stable, like he’s not dangerous in this state. “I promise you can leave whenever you want. It’’s open. And I’ll… try to generate…” Positives? How? “Enough for you to stay. For just a little.”

He doesn’t have to ask twice. They step back through the portal together, but Nightmare must go first if Dream is to make it, to travel through the pathways Nightmare manages to create, made all of concern and gratefulness and anything else he can conjure in this moment. Even so, Dream staggers a little when he arrives, and his face goes gray as though he might be sick again like before, but Nightmare can’t dwell on that or Dream will, he has to keep him here long enough to do something, to fix it or, or….

Slowly, Dream steps around to the front of that lumpy couch, and scars or no scars, he positively glows in this place, like a creature of heaven come to mingle with the inhabitants of hell. And his hands are so gentle, so light as he touches them to Sans’ skull where he curls upon that couch with his soul just disintegrating. And all at once Nightmare knows Dream has no intention of saving him, has no ability to save him, not now, and is only channeling a meager relief, a scant comfort to the subject as he passes, as he fades from lack of hope.

He’s dust within a minute, and a small smile lingers where he left. Dream draws back, and it’s the first time they’ve both cried at the same time, though for Dream it’s only a little, and Nightmare can’t stop, he can only stare, transfixed, at that little ashen heap on the couch like he’s never seen anything like it before. It’s only when Dream stumbles into him that he realizes he messed up, he’s not delivering on his word, on his promise to keep the light so Dream can stay, and so he tries again, he tries with all his might to feel some hope, some joy just like he said.

“That’s enough. It’s okay,” Dream tells him softly, and Nightmare realizes he’s latched onto his brother like a lifeline, with his eyes squinched shut and a roaring in his head. He lets out a breath and when they leave, it’s through positive and negative pathways so closely entwined they’re still holding each other on the other side.

The stars of Outertale wink down at them gravely. Dream hates cramped, closed-in spaces. It seems only fair.

“I won’t do it again,” Nightmare keeps saying, and he can practically hear Dream holding himself back, from making things better, from quelling the pain and generating comfort. They agreed they wouldn’t manipulate one another’s emotions, that they would be brothers and not keepers, if only with each other. But Nightmare can’t help it, he can’t take it, not another second of living in misery even though he deserves it, it’s as it should be and he has no right to ask, to expect anything else.

“What, you afraid I won’t regret it enough?” he huffs, and Dream smiles in a way that hurts, hurts worse than if he was still crying.

“No.”

They sit silently up against some brick wall or another, Nightmare doesn’t know, it’s on the edge of a field. And Dream radiates peace, solace, compassion. The kind that makes Nightmare feel even worse before he feels better, but that’s okay, at least it _will_ get better and he’s not alone.

“Thank you,” he says finally. For sharing the pain. For being there. For being himself, because Nightmare can’t do what Dream does, and he needs it, the whole multiverse needs it so desperately.

“It’s okay,” Dream mutters beside him. Eyes closed. Concentrating. “You’d do the same for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to Dragonfruiteen for creating this [absolutely breathtaking fanart](https://dragonfruiteen.tumblr.com/post/616923373092634624/he-lets-out-a-breath-and-when-they-leave-its) for this chapter. I seriously cried for ten minutes when I saw it. I have no words.


	15. Chapter 15

Dream is tired. Not that keepers ever actually _need_ rest. But these past several days have him almost convinced he is the exception. His cold is mostly gone but for a nasty, painful cough that will probably linger on for several more weeks at least, but still he’s weak all over, and it’s only with great difficulty that he can continue to fan that last spark of positivity within Nightmare’s soul before it goes out.

“You know…”

Dream starts and opens his eyes. He was almost drifting on conjured emotions.

“When I first heard you were out… I thought about going back and… finishing the job. That would’ve been the logical thing.”

“Of course.”

Nightmare shifts and Dream can feel him struggling not to laugh. “You wanna… just listen for a minute.”

Dream grins in the darkness but stops talking. He wants to hear this.

“I convinced myself I wasn’t relieved, I was just glad the waiting was over. The uncertainty. But I didn’t wanna go back and I figured you’d come to me, anyway. Turns out I was right.”

Dream closes his eyes again. Nightmare’s emotions have settled down enough that he thinks he can let go for now. He leans back against the wall, wearily. The air is cool and a little damp, like it rained the day before, but the sky is clear now, and all aglow with constellations.

“Fifty-seven.”

Dream frowns a little. Nightmare’s voice is strangely dispassionate.

“That’s how many people I told myself I’d killed. I didn’t even count… the…”

Suddenly Dream isn’t very tired anymore. He sits up a little straighter, hugging his knees and glancing over at the shadowy figure beside him, the stuff of nightmares if ever there was any, all powerful limbs and melted tar, pointed fangs and gleaming eyes. “Yeah?” he prods quietly, and Nightmare stiffens as though remembering he isn’t alone.

“Yeah, so… so I guess a part of me hoped you’d never come back, so I wouldn’t have to make it fifty-eight.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it, now. “Which is kinda stupid, since I was probably in the hundreds… no, thousands, by that point.”

Dream already knew this. But somehow hearing it said out like that sends a shiver down his spine.

Nightmare turns abruptly. “Want me to stop?”

Dream shakes his head. But Nightmare has lost his train of thought, or maybe he’s just choosing to, because he falls silent for a little. Dream wonders if he’d been going to detail the incidents. Dream wouldn’t have stopped him if he was. But he’s a little relieved just the same, when Nightmare starts up again and it’s not about that.

“So when you came to challenge me that first time, it was weird ‘cause… ‘cause there you were, looking exactly the same and I was….I… didn’t.”

“Do you still have your crown?” Dream isn’t sure why he asks. Of all the questions he could have come up with, it’s perhaps the least consequential of all.

Silence again. For a moment Dream fears he might have offended him somehow, but then Nightmare reaches up a hand to his own forehead. It comes away goopy.

“…Did you just check? You head? For your crown?”

“Shut up.”

Dream is about to lose it. “You mean you don’t even know if you have it on?!”

“Well it’s been a while, you know, Dream?”

Unbelievable. Dream can’t breathe. He sticks his sleeve in his mouth in a vain attempt to stifle the giggles. It doesn’t work.

“How about you, like… drift off, or something? You’re being annoying.”

Dream tips against his shoulder, dizzy with suppressed laughter. Nightmare whacks him with a tentacle, hard enough to wind him completely, and then he’s wheezing, no, coughing again. “Geez, you trying to finish the job after all?” he titters when he catches his breath, earning another slap, less violent this time, and the brief, telltale flash of teeth in the darkness. Nightmare can’t fool him, not even a little, not with his own amusement to betray him. And perhaps he realizes this because he hugs Dream next, tightly enough that Dream begins to wonder if he’ll ever breathe properly again.

And to think he spent all that time time trying to conjure up positivity.


	16. Chapter 16

Nightmare waits until Dream is completely lost to some positive pathway or another before checking for his crown again. It startles him a little, the touch of cool metal under his fingers. A sharp edge against the bone. Hesitantly, he attempts to peel it up. Pain stabs down behind his eyes and he lets go with a yelp.

Dream stirs a little beside him.

It’s like a reset. His brother drifting off so easily on his shoulder again, as if nothing during the past week ever even happened, though he knows if it hadn’t he wouldn’t be sitting here in Outertale trying to figure out how yet another foreign substance has permanently attached itself to his body.

A moment to gather his nerves, and then he continues with renewed vigor, prying it up by the flat, rectangular part at the front, biting back curses and wincing as the pain runs out of his eyes in little rivers. With a wet snap it comes free, the front half at least, and from there he’s able to work around the whole thing until it’s off. His skull burns where it rested for so long, and he scowls almost resentfully down at it where he’s got it all wrapped around one tentacle. Somehow it withstood over three-thousand years’ worth of sludge gushing over it, and still gleams a vibrant gold beneath the last, clinging vestiges of muck. He runs one slimy thumb along the surface and it’s perfectly clean, a fine, delicate halo with a break in one side, like that symbol of a crescent moon cut out of the front.

“Find it,” Dream murmurs, voice still weak and distant as his mind returns from who knows how far away.

“Yep.”

Dream shifts and reaches out as though to grab it, then drops his hand at the last moment. “Shiny,” he whispers instead.

Nightmare rolls his eyes and hands it over.

Dream sits up and takes it happily. “Wow. Not a mark on it.”

“Nope.”

Dream removes his own crown with infuriating ease and holds it out. “Here, see if mine does that.”

Nightmare eyes it dubiously. “Uhm, I don’t think…” But Dream is already putting the other one on like this is some kind of dress up game.

With a noise like a firecracker it flips out of his hand, up through the air on a puff of smoke. Nightmare manages to catch it, barely, on one tentacle before it hits the ground. It spins for a bit before petering to a stop, still smoking.

Dream is frozen at his side, one hand blackened and empty, the other still clutching his own headpiece. Slowly, his eye-lights travel up to meet Nightmare’s wide-eyed gaze.

“Are you hurt?”

Dream shakes his head.

“Holy shit.” Nightmare lets out a breath and sags back against the wall. “Holy shit, put yours back on.”

Dream does so, hands trembling ever so slightly. Nightmare closes his eyes, counting ten, before inspecting his own crown again, carefully, for damage. It shimmers almost smugly in the light from the stars, no worse for wear than after three thousand years caked in mud. Nightmare glances over at his brother, fuming, and is utterly astonished to find him shuddering with silent laughter again. Why is everything so funny to him all of a sudden? “Got any more bright ideas?” he mutters dryly, and he should’ve guessed that would only make it worse, that Dream would only double up with tears of mirth in his eyes.

The crown fits back into place rather more easily than it came off. Sludge pools up swiftly to run over it, and Nightmare grimaces a little as it settles against the raw ridges it left in his skull. But he’ll be damned if he’s gonna take it off again, after that.


	17. Chapter 17

It’s an ending. Dream giggling in Outertale only hours, no, _minutes_ , after what happened. His practiced hands at Sans’ skull, not a tremor, hardly a tear. Dream knows a lot of death, and even more of sorrow. It’s almost funny, now, that he should be the strong one, unaffected while Nightmare bawled like a child. He’s more used to accepting it, when things don’t go his way.

“You think I d-don’t got enough work to do already?”

White. Pristine. Empty. That’s what it looks like now, this place Nightmare worked so hard to construct, to fortify. Loose chunks of stone still hover here and there at the borders. Error is good at what he does. Though right now he seems a little more interested in grumbling about it.

“Hey, we all got our jobs to do,” Nightmare says flippantly, ducking as a set of heavy, blue cables shoots over his head with enough force to split the air.

“Jobs? Since when have you d-done your job? Unless your _job_ is creating more c-chaos for me to clean up so I never get a moment’s p-peace. _Job?_ ” A lassoed slab of said chaos twitches, glitches, and is gone.

“You’ve got Dream to thank for this one. I was happy to let it sit here undisturbed for all of time. Leave well enough alone, you know?”

Error is unimpressed, but suitably distracted. “Freaking… _Dream_.” Another yank and he’s practically done, this place’ll be nothing but a memory in the void. “Surprised he didn’t ferry the g-glitch off to _O-Omega_.”

Nightmare smiles a little. “He would have if he could.”

Error isn’t listening. “If he wasn’t always h-hanging around with that fucking squid, I might not have as much of a… problem…” He trails off, cocking his head to one side at the expression on the other’s face.

Nightmare is settled on the ground, hugging his knees, tentacles retracted, trying to seem smaller. It won’t be long now, right? Sometimes it seems like they’ve been fighting forever, and they don’t know how to stop, any of them. And now, at least in part that’s about to change. And it scares Nightmare, a little. To see it all crumble away. To start again.

“Hey.” Error’s standing in front of him, close enough to touch. He’d crash, sure as anything, if anyone tried. Ink would, if he was here. A tackle hug from behind, no doubt, like he doesn’t know the other hates it. But Nightmare isn’t so inclined. “That look. I know it. I’ve seen it a thousand times. It’s the one they all g-get as their life’s w-work vanishes into the void. No ch-chance of recovery.” Error grins, lost on some giddy train of thought, and for moment Nightmare is pretty sure he’s just gloating. But then his voice stutters, changes. “They never stay that way for long. They always c-come back. And make more.” He looks about two seconds away from crashing, after all, and Nightmare resists poking him with a toe to tip him over the edge.

“Guess you don’t have to worry about that with me,” he mutters.

Error snaps out of it to kick the last bit of rubble into nothing. “K-Keep telling yourself that.” And he blips away.

Alone in the nothingness, Nightmare curls up on one side. There’s barely enough negativity left for him to stay, not for much longer anyway. But it’s enough that he can linger just a little while, as the last remnants of his work slip away.


	18. Chapter 18

They never speak of what happened on that day by the falls, with Alphys. Nightmare in particular is usually avoidant of any topic relating to such a death. And Dream doesn’t press the matter. Even so, he spends a great deal of time in such timelines, the ones that he neglected. Wandering in the darkness. Crawling where he cannot walk, and never seeming to mind when it’s cramped. And when he asks, Nightmare will help him, to create that honesty in suffering, the kind that leads to candor and support rather than seclusion and death. And, when they can’t help her, the guilt enough to reset, to do it over until they can. It becomes their special project, saving Alphys, in any timeline, from herself. And neither one can manage alone.

The balance is returning.

Even so, such work is still strange and unsettling enough that Nightmare often drifts when they are finished, the full ten minutes curled up under that tree, half wanting and half dreading to find himself in the pathways around him.

“Night,” Dream interrupts one day before he can, “How are you?”

Nightmare cracks an eye open. It’s a strange question to ask when they’ve been in each other’s company for hours already. Clearly more than a customary greeting, though he is more than satisfied to provide a customary answer.“Fine.”

Dream hums and settles himself close by in that annoying way that means he wants to talk whether Nightmare does or not. But still he doesn’t speak for so long that Nightmare half drifts again before he does. “We should choose another place. In the multiverse. So we don’t have to leave so fast.”

“Ten minutes is good enough for me.” When you leave me alone so I can rest, he doesn’t say, but it’s implied. Heavily implied.

“It’s good for getting away from all the feelings, but it’s not long enough for anything else. Unless we wanna save this world, too.”

That’ll be the day. “Dream, don’t you think we have enough work to do already.” Dream snorts and doesn’t argue, but even so Nightmare is wary, almost fearful of being pulled into another project they’ll likely never finish. “That’s not how it works, anyway. The multiverse would feel our absence even if we did.”

“True.” Dream sounds distracted. Like this isn’t what he wants to talk about at all. Well, he brought it up.

“What, is the squid complaining? About the portal again?”

“Huh?” Dream blinks at him as though realizing he’s there for the first time, and Nightmare scowls. It’s Dream’s fault he _is_ here, instead of drifting off like he wants to do, so at the least he could pay attention when they’re talking. “Oh, no. I mean, he opens it all the time for himself anyway. Lots of creators originate here, he said. Guess they can imagine more things since they’re so bored.”

“Oh really.” But Nightmare isn’t all that interested either, so when Dream starts leaning on his shoulder again, he figures that’s his cue that he can rest, if only for the seven or so minutes they have left.

No such luck. “If Error knew he’d probably come wipe it out before any more got through. It drives him crazy not to know where they all come from. He blames Omega though, like he does for everything.”

Something about Dream’s tone tells him they’re still not on topic, that Dream is still working his way up to it along some poorly-planned conversational path. So Nightmare waits for him to finish, to prattle on about nothing until they’ve reached _something_ , something substantial and new and probably unpleasant.

“Yep,” Dream confirms, though Nightmare hasn’t said anything, “They’re still fighting about it. Though it never gets resolved. It’s almost like it makes them happy, to have something to argue over.”

Is that it? Nightmare sighs and puts an arm around his brother resignedly. “Well, we don’t have that problem. I don’t miss those days, Dream. Not even a little.”

“Really?” There’s something in his voice. Something that sets Nightmare on edge and he’s not sure why. “Because, if you did, we could always…”

Three barely-coherent thoughts flicker through his mind in rapid succession. The way Dream walked when they arrived, no staff and one arm beneath his cloak. The funny light in his eyes like he knew some joke he wasn’t telling. His rigid posture even now against this tree, against his shoulder.

Nightmare’s hand shoots out before he thinks, an old, practiced instinct, catching Dream in the chest so that he skids backward, still poised and balanced on his knees like he was ready for it, like it was planned. He moves and then an arrow, gold and glittering, lodges in the trunk just inches from Nightmare’s head, where his head just _was_ about second ago. He rolls and then he’s up, tentacles seething, soul pounding in his chest, and Dream nocking another arrow, getting ready for round two.

Not happening. So not happening. One tentacle after another winds up to take him down, to scoop him up into the air. But Dream must not be trying, not that much, because the second hits its mark without a fight, only curls around his chest and yanks him into the air, all set to let him drop, to fling him down.

Dream laughs. Arms limp with hilarity as he sags within his grip, and Nightmare pauses at the sound, at the realization of what just happened, of what he was about to do. “…the hell?” He lets him go, a good five feet above the ground so that he sprawls on his stomach when he hits, still laughing and clutching at his chest, at his weapon.

Nightmare breathes heavily, still poised and ready for action, though unsure which he’s meant to take. His mind is going a mile a minute, planning to strike, wanting to help, fearing to hurt. Dream heaves himself up to his hands and knees and slowly makes his way back over to the tree, to his brother where he gapes disbelievingly down at his target, at his assailant. “That was great,” Dream pants, and only then does Nightmare realize, there’s no malice, no intent to harm in the air, only a slight mischief when he listens, and a little pain where he hit him.

“Can you… point that thing somewhere else,” Nightmare stammers when he can’t think what else to say, and Dream’s eyes widen a little.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize…”

Sure he didn’t. Nightmare watches as he takes down the arrow still buried in that tree and puts it back in the quiver with the others, with the one he almost shot, and then the bow is gone too, beneath his cloak and on his back, so that his hands hang empty. Dream grins sheepishly, but then takes in Nightmare’s stance, the trembling, the confusion and it slips. A flicker of guilt, of remorse and he gets up and steps closer, drawing back at Nightmare’s flinch. “Sorry…I… was just…”

“What the flying fuck was that?”

Dream winces, grimaces and comes closer again. “I just thought… you seemed a little…listless?”

“And you figured shooting at my head might help.”

“Actually… yeah?” The guilt is gone, the grin is back, and Nightmare wants to hit him again. He takes a steadying breath instead, trying to calm his frayed nerves, and Dream does his best to look sorry, though he doesn’t actually feel sorry, since Nightmare would know if he did so that’s just stupid.

“Uhm… wanna go back?” Dream offers, since the time is nearly up, and it’s not like either of them will get any rest now.

“Yeah. I do, actually.”

Dream frowns a little with something like worry, and Nightmare thinks, Good, let him stew a little, as they step back through the portal and into that one field in Outertale. Dream is looking anywhere but at Nightmare, which suits Nightmare just fine since he’s getting his powers back, his magic back and he’s going to need it for what comes next.

“Hey, Dream.”

“Yeah?” He pauses where he’s just been converting that bow back into a staff.

“I wouldn’t do that yet if I were you.”

A wall of about five tentacles slams into him, and Dream is laughing like an idiot and rolling away, out of his reach with a half-formed weapon. “Hey, no, do-over, do-over, I wasn’t ready!”

“Fuck you.”


	19. Chapter 19

They’re not sleeping. Though they are little more than a dream to the inhabitants of most worlds - their dreams and their nightmares. They drift easily along pathways they have mended, pathways that are separate and not distant, different but not hostile. Eyes closed, slumped against that wall on the outskirts of town in Outertale. Dream’s weapon lies idle in his hands, one arrow still nocked to the string and several others littering the ground around him. A stray tentacle still snakes around his shoulders like a comforting arm, while the rest lie sprawled at the back of their owner, who is as lost as his companion, wounded but not dying, maimed but not destroyed. Though joy and sorrow will still grapple with each other, it is a dance and not a battle, an ache that can be healed, a rift that is repaired. Dream laughs where once he cried, and Nightmare cries when he would laugh. For all of it there is a season, though the time for solitude is passed. And this time, this longed-for _now_ that has come despite the others, because of all the others, is far more real, far more raw than any dream has ever been. 

“Nightmare?” 

"Hm?”

“Are we still drifting?”

"I don't think so.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it hurts like hell where you shot me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to Duskenne for this beautiful [fan art](https://duskenne-doodles.tumblr.com/post/617251635432996864/some-fanart-of-undertree-shadowporpoise-s-fic)

**Author's Note:**

> There is now a short followup work related to this one, if you're interested: [Three Millennia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28560045)


End file.
